**Guiding us through tales that need to be told.**

**In nature's arms, let our spirit release.**

**A world full of wonders, beyond compare.**

**In nature's arms, let our spirit release.**

**The journey of life is a dream come true. **

**In the vibrations of life, the true self shows.**

**In nature's arms, let our spirit release.**

**In the compass of dreams, let our hearts burn! **

**Alex Hawkins...

I’ve played ttrpg for more than 20 years. I love old fantasy books and new. I lose myself in rich characters in rich worlds full of magic and wonder.

I love making characters but have fallen in love with the stories they tell. My original idea was to write Farrago’s story. But recently though that perhaps it’s is Kyah that needs a story told. Kyah is the more important character. Perhaps the sto...

As I begin my tale of the development of "The Mirror Maiden," I am reminded of the journey of Aurora, the character at the center of the story. Her journey is one of self-discovery and transformation, one that reflects the themes and motifs that I sought to explore in this novel.

The process of writing this novel was an intricate one, a labor of love that was underpinned by a desire to explore th...

The characters in this story came to me in a dream, actually. I am a crazy dreamer as my husband can attest. It seems most mornings I have the remnants of some nutty dream in my head when I wake, and sometimes I kind of enjoy the characters that my subconscious conjures up when I think I am sleeping.

Aunt Mattie was definitely one of those. She is the archetype of the independent, strong “woman o...

Sometimes I hate when people say I have a “way with words”. What about the times I don’t feel that way? When the words don’t just flow across the page, spilling scenes like watercolor on paper? I hate when I have a beautiful idea and it’s going so well and then it’s not. And then I see someone else’s stories and feel inferior, and I’m not good enough. For example as soon as I respond to a prompt, ...

The author sat at her desk, thinking about a popular zombie show that had a prison arc. “Why weren’t the prisoners more featured?” she mumbled. “They’d have made excellent main characters.”...

I wrote the first flash based on a simple prompt of three adjectives. I focused on the word, “cold.” Instantly the moons of Saturnine came to mind. I’ve always been drawn to genre and the idea of a moon colony as a wild frontier was so verdant. I wanted to explore the ideas of sentient machines as a race and role of race in creating a new land. Extortion and bravery, technology and relationships, ...

This story came to me in pandemic lockdown, different pieces of the idea falling into place one after another. The first part came to me while I was thinking about a clip from a live-play RPG show, in which the players were put in the scenario of having to make a significant sacrifice in order to break a curse - something that would make them miserable forever if they gave it up - but the one of t...

My novel is the second volume of a trilogy so I need to get back to the very first image I had about the first one.

I saw a young girl, she couldn’t be more than 15 or 16 years old, long brown hair and a long white dress running away from a church at night. “Who is she?” I thought. “What is she running away from? Why was she even in the church?? I immediately thought this could be the spark for a...